love takes documentary

On the 6th of October we were asked to write a blog report on one of the documentaries we had watched in the creative media seminar I chose the documentary Love Takes.

Love Takes is a documentary from 2003 that interviews people of varying demographics on their opinions on the subject of love. The main focus seems to be how people deal with love, This starts by asking children about love and moving on to increasingly older generations. The questions the interviewees are asked vary from describing what love is to dealing with starting to love someone new at an advanced age. The documentary also focuses more on the emotions and feelings than any kind of physical input of love nor does it focus on etiquette just the feeling one gets.

Overall the documentary seems to take a rather positive attitude to the subject of love as although the documentary deals with themes such as rejection, fear and loss it seems to focus much more on the positive side such as the overall happiness one tends to feel when in love, This is clearly a choice that filmmaker  Jeanie Finlay directly chose as it would be just as easy to make a documentary that solely focused on the good or bad, I would speculate the reason that Finlay chose this slightly more balanced view point was to help the audience relate to the piece more as a piece that was biased for or against love may make the audience feel cynical to the film's one sided viewpoint. When looking at whether Jeanie Finlay has succeeded is documenting people's feelings on the topic of love I feel she has as the piece is both entertaining and informative which in a documentary that seems to be more documenting on love than convincing the viewer of any one opinion then really the filmmaker can not hope to do much more.

I enjoyed the film because as stated before it is easily relatable it does not say anything that the average viewer would disagree with. I also enjoyed seeing different people from different generations talk about their feelings on love which I found their opinions to be easy to understand and believe. The documentary also paced itself well as it always felt like it wasn't rushing things but at the same time also it doesn't feel too slow.  I also enjoyed the children's sometimes humorous responses but was also interested in the more mature responses that people gave as the film went on.

One element that particularly stood out for me was the slowly more serious tone the documentary took as it went on to more mature interviewees as if the film was maturing at the same rate the subject and interviewees were this structure fits in well with the rest of the piece and compliments the simple style the film has, As the parts of the screen that aren't covered by those being interviewed have a red and black background effect that is most likely to keep the audience in mindset of love as red is often synonymous with love. as well as the interesting approach of the film maturing with the subject and interviewees I also found the way that the film would flash up words and sentences that the interviewees had said as if the remind the audience how important these parts of love are something that i feel works well as it is clear to notice but it's intent is subtle.